


Where End Meets Beginning

by china_shop



Category: White Collar
Genre: Background pre-slash, Domestic, Episode Related, Fic, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-16
Updated: 2012-11-16
Packaged: 2017-11-18 20:12:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/564820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/china_shop/pseuds/china_shop
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A break-up is difficult, even if it was your idea in the first place.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Where End Meets Beginning

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mergatrude](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mergatrude/gifts).



> Set after 4.05. References to 4.08. Primarily gen, but with hints of background pre-Clinton/Neal.

Diana yawned three times during the team briefing. She did her best to hide it, but even after she gulped down the rest of her coffee and forced her eyes open wider, she knew she wasn't fooling anyone. Peter was pretending he hadn't noticed, Caffrey was giving her an annoyingly sympathetic look, and Jones just caught her eye and shook his head meaningfully. Tired as she was, Diana had no idea what that meant.

It wasn't the breakup that was costing her sleep, exactly. She felt freer than she had in years, more alive. She knew she'd made the right decision. But she missed Christie as a friend, and she missed the apartment. It was only fair that Christie stayed there, given Diana had been the one to leave. Diana didn't begrudge that. But she'd been camped out on her friend Lisa's futon couch in her tiny Chinatown apartment above a busy restaurant for the last week and a half. There was barely room to turn around. Diana was keeping most of her things in her car.

After the meeting, Jones brought her a latte from the cart outside. "Hear me out before you say anything," he said. "I have a proposal."

That sounded ominous, but Diana was grateful for the coffee. "I'm listening."

"There's a two-bedroom available in my building, as of next week." Jones pulled up a chair, the better to make his sales pitch. "Second floor. I thought I'd see what it's like to have windows, but the rent—I'd need a roommate."

"So?" Diana smothered another yawn.

Jones gave her a patient look. "You need a new place, right?"

"Oh." Diana put down the coffee. "Wait, is this a pity offer?"

"Nah, I figure it's like Murphy's Law," said Jones. "The moment we start rooming together, I'll meet the girl of my dreams, and it'll be inconvenient as hell." He sounded more complacent than perturbed by this. Diana gave him another confused look, and he grinned. "Hey, at least I'll meet her. And until then, you and I can be each other's wingman, so to speak."

"Mm." Diana picked up the latte again and drank it thoughtfully. She hadn't shared a dwelling with a man since she'd left home, but she knew Jones pretty well, his bad habits as well as his good ones, and he didn't get on her nerves. The couple of times she'd been to his place, it had been tidy. And there was the convenience factor. Plus, when it came down to it, he was the only person who would ever really understand what it was like to work in White Collar these days. "Let me sleep on it."

 

*

 

Diana balanced a box topped with a trash bag full of clothes against her hip and knocked. Her back ached, and she was worn-out. Whose idea had it been to move in Friday evening instead of waiting till Saturday anyway? She could have handled one more night on Lisa's couch. Maybe. Probably. Okay, not really. At least once this was over, it would be worth it. 

The door opened, and Jones took the trash bag, easing her burden. "Hey."

Behind him, there was a towering labyrinth of furniture and boxes, and snaking his way through the labyrinth, wearing jeans and a t-shirt and carrying a drooping potted plant, was Neal. 

"What's Caffrey doing here?" asked Diana, not bothering to hide her disapproval. She was tired. The last thing she needed was to be on guard against devious con man antics.

"Helping," said Neal, cheerfully bulletproof.

"He volunteered," said Jones, as if that explained everything.

"What are friends for?" Neal placed the plant on a windowsill and eyed Diana doubtfully. "Or you could think of this as a team-building exercise."

"I'd rather think of it as not being at work," said Diana, grouchily. She dumped her box on top of a stack of other boxes and straightened, wincing, then realized both guys were looking at her, eyebrows raised. Diana sighed. "I have more stuff in the car," she conceded.

"I can help with that," said Neal.

"Thanks." Diana said it grudgingly, but actually it was good to have Neal there. Diana didn't have a lot of things to move, but Jones had a whole apartment full, and it would have taken a lot longer with just two. And Neal was efficient and uncomplaining—at least until they finished and Jones broke out the beer.

"I don't suppose you have anything—else." Neal held the bottle with the tips of his fingers as if to avoid contamination. 

Diana rolled her eyes. "Suck it up, Caffrey."

Jones wrinkled his nose at her tone, which was a pretty severe rebuke coming from him, and even Neal looked cowed, though knowing Caffrey, that was probably an act. 

Diana grabbed a couch cushion, dropped it on the couch and collapsed there, wishing she could crawl under it instead. "Sorry," she said. "The last couple of weeks have been kinda rough."

"It's the weekend now," said Jones. "Fresh start."

"Yeah." Diana let her head fall back and looked at the ceiling, trying to decide if there was any part of her that wasn't exhausted. "Hey, let's get pizza, okay? It's on me."

"Sounds good." Neal was infuriatingly wide awake, and for a second, Diana hated him with all the cold, tired animosity in her soul. Then he added in a muffled voice, "I saw some takeout menus around here somewhere. Oh, here," and her hatred was overwritten by a sudden rush of appreciation. Maybe Caffrey wasn't so bad after all.

 

*

 

It took a week for the apartment to start feeling like home, and by then, the internet was hooked up and Jones had stopped lounging around the living room watching random stupid TV shows and taken to disappearing into his bedroom for hours at a time. Diana didn't know what he did online—when she asked, he said with maximum vagueness, "Oh, you know, I hang out on some forums"—but she suspected he played World of Warcraft or something, like Lisa. Other than that, he was the ideal roommate, easy-going and unobtrusive. He turned his music down when she asked, and cooked uninspiring but edible dinners for both of them a couple of times. 

He also went to the gym most days, took Kali classes in the weekends, and one morning she caught him doing yoga on a mat in the sun by the living room window. Diana felt like a bundle of bunched, raw nerves in comparison, a scream waiting to happen. She tried going running, but her stamina seemed to have deserted her, and she tried reading but she couldn't concentrate. 

She'd bought a new bed and dresser, but even with them and all her books and clothes, her bedroom felt empty and unbalanced. No Frida Kahlo prints on the wall or stacks of mystery novels. So she worked and ate and slept, and waited to feel like herself again. She hadn't been single in the better part of a decade, she reminded herself. These things took time.

It was the second week when missing Christie really hit. Diana went out with a couple of friends, just to catch up, and when she got home with half a dozen drinks under her belt, she sprawled on the couch in the dark, kicked off her shoes and called Christie. They'd been friends as well as lovers. She just wanted to hear her voice. "Hey," she said. "It's Di. I found a couple of your CDs in my things. I could bring them around."

"I don't think that's a good idea," said Christie. She sounded stiff, not her usual self.

Diana closed her eyes. "We can't even be friends, now?"

"Di, I haven't heard from you in nearly three weeks," said Christie. "You broke up with me and disappeared. That's not friends." The phone line hissed with static. "And don't you try to—"

"Christie, I just want to explain what—"

"No," shouted Christie. "I don't want to see you. I don't want to talk to you. Don't call me." She hung up, leaving Diana alone in the dark.

"Fuck." Diana shuffled her hips sideways so she could tug a throw pillow out from under her and hugged it tightly to her chest. She was not going to cry. "Dammit!"

The overhead light came on, and Jones was standing in the doorway, his face impassive. Diana flushed with shame and embarrassment. It was late. She'd probably been yelling. God, she was a disaster. She spent all day being cheerful and professional at work, and she couldn't even hold it together in the low-pressure environment of a dark, empty room.

"Sorry," she started, but he shook his head.

"Not a problem." He turned on a lamp and switched the overhead light back off. Diana wished he'd just leave and let her suffer her humiliation in private, but he went to the bookcase by the TV and took down a half-empty bottle of expensive looking Scotch and a couple of tumblers. "Move over."

Diana moved her feet so he could sit down. "Bet you're regretting asking me to room with you now."

Jones poured them each a small measure and handed hers over, then sat back and studied the liquid in his own glass. "The last couple of years, my personal life has got kind of—" He shrugged. "—sterile. Predictable. It was making me feel old."

"And now you have me to bring the drama," said Diana, with a touch a bitterness. "Happy to be of service."

Jones gave her a look. "Drink," he said. "I guess I think, you know, the hours we work, there's not a lot of time to make new friends."

That was true. Even Christie worked fewer hours than Diana. Most of Diana's friends were people she'd met through Christie. Diana sipped her drink. "This is good."

"Can't take the credit." Jones took a mouthful of his own, visibly savoring it. "Neal left it here."

"Caffrey?" Diana shook her head. "What's with him, anyway? You'd think he didn't have a home of his own." Which was unfair—Neal had only been over once since the move; Diana had come home from running some names for Peter on Saturday afternoon to find Neal and Jones locked in battle over a backgammon board—but it made her twitchy to have him in her home.

"He works the same hours we do," said Jones, apparently untroubled by her antagonism. "And given his situation—"

"The anklet." Diana hadn't really thought about that. Life with a radius. She didn't want to think about it now. "Whatever," she said. "Listen, I know I'm a mess, but I will get better, I promise. And in the meantime, thanks for putting up with me, Jones."

Jones wrinkled his nose. "Could you call me Clinton?"

Diana grinned despite herself. "Not CJ?" she teased.

"Clinton," he said firmly.

"Okay. Thanks, Clinton." Diana took another drink, feeling inexplicably better. Maybe what she really needed was a friend, someone who saw her as herself, and not a broken half of Christie-and-Di.

 

*

 

Peter and Neal were in the conference room, reviewing the evidence on the Houghton case and, at least in theory, coming up with a plan of attack to pitch to the rest of the team, when Diana came in. "Clinton's found a connection between Houghton and Lyall," she reported. "He's just confirming it now."

Peter and Neal both looked up, Peter with raised eyebrows and Neal with a curiously blank expression.

"It's Clinton now?" said Peter.

"That's his name," said Diana, with the finality that came from a lifetime of standing up for herself and her friends. And apparently that settled it. Peter and Neal followed her lead, the junior agents took their cue from Peter, and within a few days, everyone from Hughes down was calling Clinton by his first name. 

Clinton himself didn't say a word about it, but he seemed to loosen up a little in response, maybe without even realizing it. The charcoal suit became less of an impenetrable suit of armor. Diana briefly regretted not having asked sooner what name he preferred, but hell, he could have said something if it bothered him, seven years and all those hours in the van. Maybe the switch was just part of his early mid-life crisis, like inviting her to room with him in the first place.

 

*

 

A week later, Diana came home after her first real post-breakup date—dinner, a movie and an awkward goodnight kiss-on-the-cheek—to find Clinton watching her _The L Word_ DVDs. She rolled her eyes, got a glass of milk and shoved him aside so she could share the couch. "Seriously?"

He shrugged, unabashed. "How was your date?" he asked without taking his eyes from the screen, where Tina and Bette were arguing. 

"Fine," said Diana automatically. She picked up the remote and ran her thumbnail down the seam of its casing. "Kind of terrible, really." Clinton breathed a laugh, and she smiled too, relieved to have admitted it aloud. "I had way more fun on my fake date with Abigail the Thief."

"Well, she was a con artist—saying all the right things, telling you what you wanted to hear. That's gotta be a tough act to follow." Clinton sounded preoccupied, maybe caught up in Tina and Bette's relationship angst.

"Exactly," said Diana. "And look how that turned out. Anyway—how about you? Is Murphy's Law working? Have you met the girl of your dreams?"

Clinton sent her a quick sideways glance, then turned his attention back to the show. He looked embarrassed. "It might not be a girl."

"Huh?" Diana frowned, distracted by the awfulness of her date and the nostalgia of a TV show she'd used to love. It took her a few seconds to process his answer:

"I think I might be bisexual," he said.

"Seriously." Diana blinked at him. "Are you seeing someone?" In her experience, it was usually a crush or a developing relationship that triggered these kinds of revelations, but surely if Clinton were dating, she'd know about it. Maybe it was someone at the gym, or someone online. Maybe he was having a cyber-affair.

"Not really," said Clinton. He propped his bare foot on the coffee table and drummed his fingers on his thigh. "It's complicated."

"It's always complicated," said Diana nodding mechanically. Clinton was bi. She'd have to take him to the next LGBTQ mixer at work, show him the ropes. In fact— "Hey, that's really why you asked me to room with you, isn't it? You want to start a big gay FBI commune."

Clinton grinned. "You are a very suspicious person."

"Occupational hazard," said Diana, and drank some milk, feeling like her little brother had just come out to her. Given she was an only child, it was an unfamiliar sensation, but she kind of liked it.

"I'm still figuring it out," said Clinton under his breath. He was watching the TV, but Diana could feel his attention on her, gauging her reaction. 

She reached across and punched him companionably on the arm. "Don't sweat it. We're all still figuring this out," she said. "You'll be fine."

And on the TV the credits started to roll, just like in life—the end of one story heralding the imminent beginning of the next.

END


End file.
